the #1 advice I would give to a young engineer entering their career is to do everything they can to avoid becoming cynical. technology has cycles, but it also moves forward. it's a helix. most people who churn through a few cycles end up becoming cynical, failing to see the orthogonal dimension of progress.
how to avoid cynicism? the primary way is to remove cynics from your life, and add optimists. second to that, keep working on new enough areas that you maintain a beginners mindset and can offset some of the pattern matching that leads one to thinking everything worthwhile has been done before.
I just wish the controls were more granular. There's people I follow for their actual posting who also just drag in a bunch of drama that they hit like on.
I like the people I follow but they get like 5 likes on interesting things they have to say, and 500 likes on depressing takes like "computers were a mistake", or "everything is bad because capitalism" or fake uplifting content like "my title is senior engineer and I googled a thing today, normalize failure". I think twitter algorithm promotes that kind of content and I guess they have to adopt if they want their follower count to go up.
In fact, I would call it a hyper-dimensional helix. :-) With each new iteration (or rewrite), we're often expanding in a conceptual dimension we couldn't realistically reach or even imagine before.
People who disagree automatically feel like they have new information to bring, while it's often hard to express agreement while still feeling like you're adding to the conversation.
"Removing cynics from your life" sounds a lot like living in a bubble. Like exclusively watching Disney movies and thinking that is the general mindset. Instead try to accept reality for what it is.
Steve Yeggie's Note from the Magic Bus[1] is a decade old, & rambles through the particulars of the day, but it's still the canonical read on how you predispose yourself, on whether you opt into belief or disbelief. It's lessons have stuck with me for a long time. There's a lot of concern & fear & doubt, skepticism about the corporate environment, about other engineers, and the skepticism is all so due; there's a responsible & safe desire to stick to the known & secure. And yet, and yet...
Steve helped me unshackle myself; kick-started a thinking about what values were really important to me, not just professionally, but what kind of a person I wanted to be amid the environment in which I am thrown. The corporate capitalist world (& to a lesser degree the young-guns-ultra-productive engineering departments) deserves deep cynicism. I've heard so many good & great intents put off, and so many wild betterments ignored. But Steve helped me find an inner stoic that insisted on, that demanded- that believed in- progress, in other engineers, in trying for extra, in myself, in doing good, even when it probably wasn't going to be convenient or easy. Engineering is filled with cynicism & this made clear what a spectrum our opinions lay across, laid bare how cynical, how pessimistic most of the world about me was.
I endeavor to help & support others, to try for good, in ways that I would never have thought about for reading Notes from the Magic Bus. I still await such a clear & obvious life-changing post appearing ever again. This one's alright. But it doesn't deal close enough with the conflict, with how horrid it can be, suffering the un-smart gumption of the erring-do-wellers. It helped convince me to try to help see things along a lot, even if the picks & choices aren't necessarily totally what I would do. To be optimistic, not just in my own sphere, but in working with others. Please, read. Let me, let us know what you think.
This is strange to me. I feel like I am very cynical about the business, but I have almost no ill will toward other programmers or their approaches at all. For me the issue is looking up the managemet chain, or outside at the effects of my changes.
I can safely say that I have never as a programmer implemented a feature that I thought made anyone's life better. My software has consistently turned the screws in on people's lives, either in their work life by making monotonous internal tools or in their personal life by removing autonomy and choice. I take magicians and turn them into mechanical Turks. I take people and turn them into consumers/users/addicts.
This isn't supposed to be a diatribe, just contributing my N=1 that Notes from the Magic Bus seems cute and superficial to me, defending the culture of office politics by elevating it to the importance of actual politics.
> I can safely say that I have never as a programmer implemented a feature that I thought made anyone's life better. My software has consistently turned the screws in on people's lives, either in their work life by making monotonous internal tools or in their personal life by removing autonomy and choice. I take magicians and turn them into mechanical Turks. I take people and turn them into consumers/users/addicts.
Shouldn't you take a systemic approach? Individuals can do lots of things, but until it turns systemic, is there a reason to adopt this negativity-first mindset? (And even then, I think OP makes a good case for why one shouldn't.) Kids were shitty to me in middle school, but I don't think I should indemnify all of humanity because of that.
Why would I take a systemic approach to my own singular life? I make art now, and I get a lot of joy in it. The path out wasn’t to change myself but to remove myself from what I found to be soulless work.
> The path out wasn’t to change myself but to remove myself from what I found to be soulless work.
These aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for something to be bad _for you_ but not be bad _for everyone_, especially if there are particular circumstances around you that cause the experience to be bad. It's like deciding never to date again after a bad relationship (which certainly has crossed the minds of friends of mine). It's not about changing yourself, it's about keeping an open mind.
> By realizing that the world is always changing, and by stopping to complain, we opt out of seeing the world through cynical glasses ... When we realize that our life can change, we can change it.
I don't think cynicism is just about stasis, but about spotting when optimistic messages are hiding a power-grabbing scheme of some kind. Or just being willing to 'follow the money', and look behind the curtain, etc.
Plenty of new things are important developments, even when there are selfish actors behind them. But also plenty of new things are just scams.
Ultra-agree, that a lot of cynicism- against from those in power & who need others to enlist in the message- is due. But I think there's a general level of mistrust, of wanting to pick easy/simple/dependable paths, of resisting good/bold/better, that's just a personal "pragmatism" which is really cynicism in disguise.
I don't think most engineering departments & product-development-organizations give anywhere near a fair shake to doing good, to trying for better. There's so many meetings called to discuss options, to try to suss out where to go, that revolve around mistrust, that are simply a hunt for security. And there's a good chance these hunts for security are right, that mediocrity would better serve us all. But theres ongoing & persistent resistance, un-understanding of better, that pervades, and I'd like to see a little more optimism, a little more shared idea of possibility about. I think there's a lot of possibility that we consign away, a lot of true organizational excellence (& personal glory along with it) that the easier/safer paths ignore.
I also think HN is a classic, key demonstration of cynicism. I feel like a lot of new ideas presented get slammed, that the critics have a field day. I'd love a broad asssessment of positive/negative valence of posts. My gut feeling is that the novel gets extremely hostile reception here. Someone combined mutable torrents with webtorrent[1], & there felt like such vast continuing cynicism, such "what are the use cases?", such tearing it down, such disbelief & resistance. This just feels like one of endless countless examples of cyncism & disbelief, such desire to disregard, to put the new, potential, positives into a box that can be safely disregarded. This to me is the poison we swallow.
For sure. 100%. Be wary of what people are selling. Be wary of the power-grabbing. But I think we ought try to wire ourselves to be positive if we can. We should look for the tell-tale signs, & try to promote & support the potentially good, the things that may have merit, to have optimism. While calling out the specific delusions & exploitionations that may be afoot.
It's a balancing. But we should try, try try try, to find optimism. Just not without disregarding reason.
The internet (well, just worldwide connectivity IMO) has turned cynicism into a social signaling mechanism, it's not just HN. Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications to your in-group: make a "hot take" against US democrats, CRT, cryptocurrencies, management, VCs, capitalism, pastafarianism, you name it, and you'll get all your fellow in-group folks upvoting/retweeting/liking your "hot take". IMO this is the greatest threat of all; once group-identity politics are tied to takedowns, there's a huge incentive for dunking on ideas, which makes folks with new/weird ideas defensive about their own and therefore damages novel discourse. I'm not going to say I haven't been drawn into this myself at times but I try to think above it.
I'm having a very hard time trying to understand what you are trying to communicate here: there's a quite divergent set of topics that have been lumped together as hostile, dangerous, & negative, & it doesn't compute for me. I'm going to take things one by one, so we can talk particulars & explore how we see these.
> The internet (well, just worldwide connectivity IMO) has turned cynicism into a social signaling mechanism, it's not just HN.
We're cutting to the punch here, but: a lot of the thing you are about to list sound less like "the internet" & more like general society waking up & understanding what's less than optimal.
> make a "hot take" against US democrats,
They're pretty useless absolutely but the opposition has been stalwartly effective. Bernie wasn't that far off from being president & even though he's far outside the current party, the core consitutents desire far far more from this party. A lot of democrats-the-people loath the uselessnessness. Hot takes are deserved against any party that has gotten so little done. But also, most democrats are pretty sympathetic to how impossible the situation has been, how constitutionally rigged everything has been against them getting any chance to do anything. It's been decade after decade of democrats having zero actual chance to pass anything meaningful, other than, say, Romneycare. the demorat's are slammable but we all know there's not in many's lifetime been a single chance to determine whether they're actually useful or not.
Mostly deserved & out of touch higher echelon's detached from ground truth. The one exception IMO: I don't see any dunking against Critical Race Theory (CRT)s that doesn't come off as maligning & poisonous. There's no popular way to be anti-woke, yay.
> pastafarianism
Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
To return to our seeming core disagreement, you said:
> Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications to your in-group:
This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> it's not just HN. Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications... you'll get all your fellow in-group folks upvoting/retweeting/liking your "hot take". IMO this is the greatest threat of all
I've walked point by point through how I don't see your listed examples as bad or hazarous or cynical. There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better. And...
> there's a quite divergent set of topics that have been lumped together as hostile, dangerous, & negative, & it doesn't compute for me
I don't mean to say that any of these in particular are or are not hostile, dangerous, or negative. They were examples of issues that people like to have "dunks" or "hot takes" on.
> Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
I'm not trying to sort these into sides. That's my point.
> This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
> It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better.
The long rut of what, on what time scale, when? When was it "better" and when did it become "worse"? It wasn't that long ago that McCarthyism was used to bully political sides, when the US and the Soviet Union propped up brutal puppet regimes to fight proxy wars, when Africa/India/China was divided into an arbitrary map of colonial powers, when queer folks were unacceptable in the general public while being ruthlessly bullied (and this continues to this day!) in private, when Muslims/Arabs/South Asians were regularly frisked in Western airports, when people of color had their lives ruined for the possession of token amounts of recreational drugs. It's always been this way.
My point has nothing to do with either "side". That some of these are negative things by some and positive things by other is also something that I understand and accept. My point is that, when you create group-identity, you begin to get dialogue like "because fuck capitalism" that gets many upvotes/shares/engagement, instead of nuanced arguments like "there's no recourse for labor to fall back onto when management manipulates them". What that does is it crowds out the voices of people interested in novel ideas ("what if I get dunked on for being socialist/capitalist/Georgist/whatever") and shifts the dialogue away from problems and solutions into in-group signaling ("yeah I'm gonna upvote all the anti-capitalist posts because f*** the 1%!"). It's a culture that makes people defensive and adversarial ("ugh I wanna see what IPFS is all about but they're associated with Filecoin which is crypto and all my friends hate crypto so I shouldn't") instead of supportive and uplifting. It also then incenitivizes people ("huh I get lots of upvotes when I hate on <X>, so I should keep doing it") to keep up the cycle of hot takes. When cynicism meets group-identity politics, you get IMO the worst case.
OP here, if you're able to separate the act of "look behind the curtain" from the visceral feeling that things can change and you can be the one improving them - then I'm very happy for you.
I personally found it hard to separate the two for many year, and fell in the pattern of unifying them. Cynical outlook has been a helpful protecting mechanism, though no longer as useful, as I'm trying to find and play more win-win games.
Yes maybe my definition is wrong, I consider myself slightly cynical (I lived to see the excitement of cyberspace turn into Facebook after all), but perhaps I mean skeptical, although to me what you're talking about is more nihilism.
There are some things that really don't change, and I guess that can be a source of cynicism. The poor will always be among you, lying politicians, the greedy rich, etc. But I'd argue that isn't cause for inaction, quite the opposite, though I can see nihilists just retreating to their beds in despair.
Interesting point about nihilism, appreciate your discussion. I still identify as cynical in many domains, though I don't think of myself as nihilistic as the latter seems more absolute.
Re: things that really don't change, I'd say "until they do". Plenty of examples in history where the whole system switches to a different equilibrium point (for example as in "Inadequate Equilibria" book).
When I'm referring to cynicism, I'm talking about the difference between the mindset of "these will never change", vs "these are attractor points in the current social system, which all history so far have been used, but the system may have other equilibriums and solutions for which X=`the rich are not greedy`".
The things that don't change I refer to, I really mean human nature, and I really think that doesn't change much. Some people just want to watch the world burn, etc, some people are greedy, narcissistic, lazy, psychotic, etc.
The cause for optimism, is that we can change society to better deal with the nature of the beast, bring out the best, and suppress the ugly. There's lots of work to do!
We live in a world on near limitless abundance. We already live in a potential post-scarcity world.
The only reason there are poor among us IS the greedy rich; but the greedy rich isn't some faceless, abstract, unkillable cosmic god. They have names and addresses; what they have can be taken from them as has happened many many times throughout history.
Things can change, sometimes slowly, sometimes incredibly quickly.
We have seen the impossible become inevitable over and over in the last few decades, and yet it still seems impossible for people to imagine the "impossible". I wonder if there is a name for that sort of fallacious thinking.
Yes, the rich can be stripped. But they'll be replaced by another elite. I think human nature will tend towards some kind of hierarchy.
The opportunity is to make the currency of that hierarchy something far above basic needs, IMHO. Perhaps this could be a genuine use-case for cryptocurrencies, so that the ultra wealthy can 'keep score' in maths, rather than mega-yachts, private jets, dark satanic mills, etc.
Is that really cynicism? If you are willing to look behind the curtain or follow the money, you must believe there's a chance that some optimistic messages are actually honest, right? Otherwise, why bother looking?
The viewpoint that says "why bother looking" is cynicism, I think. This is the viewpoint that says "all optimistic messages are power grabbing schemes." And it is a really disempowering and hopeless way of viewing the world.
I think it is better to keep looking behind the curtain. There's got to be something good back there.
I think „why bother looking“ is actually defeatism. Maybe they are closely related, but I feel cynicism has more of an „I told you so“ ring to it. In that interpretation, cynicism would be about jaded expectations re the future, while defeatism would be (accompanying?) demotivation. I wouldn’t ascribe demotivation to every cynicist though.
> about spotting when optimistic messages are hiding a power-grabbing scheme of some kind
IMO that's not being cynical. That's actually an universally positive trait: being able to spot power-grabbing schemes.
The problem with the negative side of cynicism described in the article is that, (to follow your example) the power-grabbing scheme is not the thing being detected, but rather the display of optimism. Every display of optimism is treated as being a power-grabbing scheme, or worse, naivety.
The things cynics end up attacking in the end isn't the power grabbing per se, but the optimism.
The answer is not to attack everything optimistic, but also neither to attack nothing. Life is hard.
That is what is derogatorily called cynicism in the OP. Perhaps as one studies history they find that all forms of positive change conceivable by mere humans have been co-opted and are accounted for in the extremely energetic struggle of the system to remain alive, as it has been selected for very much Darwinistically.
> That is what is derogatorily called cynicism in the OP.
Then, there are clearly two things being called cynicism here.
Arguing that the author is wrong because X is good when the author is actually talking about Y is a fruitless exercise.
> Perhaps as one studies history they find that all forms of positive change conceivable by mere humans have been co-opted and are accounted for in the extremely energetic struggle of the system to remain alive, as it has been selected for very much Darwinistically.
That still doesn't and won't ever mean that positive change is negative. If you're still throwing the baby with a bathwater, you're the bad kind of cynic.
My unpopular opinion, have healthy dose of cynicism, optimism and pessimism. You will need to use them in different set of situations. And then there is the question of default, cultural differences. Show in the picture below :)
Thanks for sharing. I briefly mentioned that "never changing" world in the article but didn't expand on it there. But it was a super strong emotion which motivated this essay and shift in outlook.
One of the great frustrations in these debates, is the tendency to criticize a messenger who sees a cynical system. Instead of blaming the system for being cynical. Sometimes the most Optimistic people are shut out of debates, because they won't assume the system is optimized for a noncynical purpose. My suspicion is that this ostracization is what grows the cynicism out of control.
I think it stems from complaining is lazy. Its much more difficult to see why things are they way they are or see the virtue in things even if they have flaws.
Its not that complaining has no place, its just that most complaining is is the lowest common denominator and doesn’t contribute much.
Another good quote for the OP is Miguel De Cervantes, author if Don Quixote: "there is madness in too much sanity, and the greatest madness of all is to see things as they are instead of as they should be".
He would know: Cervantes killed a rival on a duel at 17 and fled to sea. They were attacked by pirates and he fought well before getting his hand blown off and taken prisoner. He lived in captivity but befriended his captor, who taught him chess and literacy. Then he was "rescued" by monks who bought his freedom but placed him on indentured servitude through debt, which he finally escaped by writing one of the early great novels.
The point of this story is not that cynics were wrong but that one never would have survived his ordeal. In a world fit for cynics, you have to be ready for things to go right if you want to escape.
I didn't know this story so I looked it up [0]. According to Plutarch, it's true: Caesar was captured by pirates in his twenties, and was insulted by their lowball ransom of 20 talents--he thought he was worth at least 50. He told the pirates they should up the ransom and that once it was delivered and he was freed, he'd have them all crucified. They thought it was a pretty good joke. He wasn't joking. Once free, he raised an army and a fleet and went back to the pirate's camp, capturing them and having them thrown in prison. Apparently he showed them mercy by having their throats cut before they were crucified, however.
It's actually an extreme case of privilege. The pirates were probably some very poor commoners who turned to a life of crime, while he was a member of one of the most powerful political families in Ancient Rome.
His upbringing was nothing like that of what were probably children the dirt poor farmers.
He was lucky that no one snapped (I imagine some did but the thought of such a huge amount of money meant that everyone was kept in line) and the rest is just a bold and vengeful ultra rich, ultra privileged person getting their revenge.
It is very bold, but my point is that commoners were naturally very afraid of nobles. On top of that, in this particular case they knew the financial value of capturing a noble, let alone the fact that this particular noble promised them even more money.
As another commoner you'd probably get gutted like a fish if you'd try the same thing.
It's true but being noble was its own thing with its own particular risks and costs. If you were to choose undeserving nobles across history IMHO J C would be among the worst sells.
OP here, thanks a lot for sharing this enlightening story. Your last paragraph remind me also of the Viktor Frankl's "Man Search For Meaning" where the change in outlook was a difference between persevering and perishing in the camps.
> Your last paragraph remind me also of the Viktor Frankl's "Man Search For Meaning" where the change in outlook was a difference between persevering and perishing in the camps.
Which is complete and utter nonsense. Sure, it makes for nice advertising for Frankl's Logotherapy shtick but it's not an accurate picture of what happened in the camps.
The fundamental point of people giving up vs resisting is the core thesis of Frankl and has rung true to every facet of life. Even if we are to assume his story is embellished, I have seen it played out time and time again.
Been a while since I read it, but iirc one of his examples is of fellow captives telling themselves they'll be free before the new year, then the new year comes, still not free, and those would be the first ones to go (your "giving up").
But the alternative I never took as "resisting" - but "purpose." Frankl's own purpose being the study of people under such extreme conditions, but his point (again, iirc) being that having that indefinite, daily, purpose is what keeps people alive and brings meaning.
Now, granted, it's been a while since I read it, but can you provide some color to this notion of "resisting" ? It'd be interesting if you took something completely different away from it (or if I remember it incorrectly and should be corrected.)
Frankl suggests that the people who perished in Nazi concentration camps could have survived if they had a better attitude. This is intellectually dishonest and morally repugnant. It is akin to suggesting that people who suffer from depression should just try not being sad, only much much worse.
I will hazard a guess and say that nothing you have seen played out time and time again compares to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Why are you absolutely misintepreting his argument? It is completely obvious that he's saying that keeping hopes up helps, and helps a lot a lot. He's not trying to defy the laws of physics by which malnourished people can survive what is impossible.
I suppose you were there with Frankl and can tell us all about it and how you managed to survive. Did you ask to have your ladle of soup scooped "from the bottom" or did you have a superior strategy for survival?
Your comment is a vacuous, bald assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick". Next time you comment, consider shedding light on the matter rather than merely smearing and adumbrating.
I believe the GP is largely spot on. Evidence is not easy for me to link to now—when I looked into this a few years ago, I looked up a few of the books linked to in the substantial Controversy section of Frankl's wikipedia page. That section was erased by Frankl's grandson a couple of years ago–yes, hard to believe. Before that, it said something like - Frankl only spent a week at Auschwitz, not the many months the book gives you the impression of. Before then, Frankl also himself did medical experiments on Jews (yes really, pretty horrific ones) and tried to get the Nazis interested in them. I read in detail about these claims in chapters of the books that used to be linked to, and in a couple of sources those books mentioned in turn. They seemed true, as far as I could tell. Maybe you can find them from the page history.[0] Also it mentioned that when Frankl tried to give a talk in New York in the 1970s he was shouted down by Jews calling him a Nazi. After learning more about him, that doesn't surprise me. It seems scandalous that Frankl's grandson has been able whitewash his story like this on wikipedia. I'm not a regular wikipedia editor, so I didn't know what to do about that besides register a protest on the talk page.
I also read and loved Frankl's book decades ago, and discovering something of the real story was highly disturbing. Also it seems that in actuality, positive mental attitude didn't keep you alive in the camps, although it sounds nice that it would. Survival was much more random. I believe people whose relatives died in the camps were/are highly offended by his suggestion that if only they'd had a better attitude they would've survived. It seems like victim blaming. The page also linked to a discussion of that, from memory. Sorry I don't have anything more concrete than that. It would be nice to restore links to those books, essays, etc to at least the talk page of Frankl's wikipedia page! Although it seemed like just Frankl's grandson deleting anything negative. (I haven't looked at Frankl's page for a year or 2, maybe it's changed)
[0] Finding out when Frankl's grandson (who has commented on the talk page I think) did his first edits, and looking just before that, might be a good way to find the old Controversy section.
Thanks for the response, as I was unaware of this. Unlike the GP, you've provided reasons for the criticism which is what I'd rather see than bald assertions of "person bad".
The assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick". That was the sole content of the comment. If there's a reason to be critical, I want to know why, not be treated to name-calling.
It was in response to a comment that stated the gist of Frankl's argument i.e. the change in outlook was a difference between persevering and perishing in the camps. The context is right there in the quotation.
To me, the idea that people died in concentration camps because they had bad attitudes is as nonsensical as suggesting gravity is a social construct. You might feel my dismissal needs more explanation. I respectfully disagree and this is a hill I'm willing to die on.
And another from The Magus by John Fowles: "...cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all."
> The point of this story is not that cynics were wrong but that one never would have survived his ordeal
It's interesting you'd use that story to make your point because about 2,000 years earlier Diogenes, the founder of Cynicism, was supposedly captured by pirates on the Mediterranean and sold into slavery. Not only did he survive but the man who purchased him was so impressed that he appointed him to run his household and tutor his children.
Leading upper-case Cynic philosophers exhibited a lot of behavior that might be called lower-case cynical today.
A criticism that is as old as Diogenes (at least Laertius) is that they were essentially a cult of edgelords. They pretended not to care what people thought, but it was just an act, at the same time it was really important to them that people around them knew how little they cared through all the shockingly (lower case) cynical things they said and did. DL has Plato accuse Diogenes of this directly. All this is reducing a philosophy to a trope, but it's not an entirely unfair accusation either.
Speaking of which, a bizarre and entertaining piece of history is Lucian's extremely hostile biography of Peregrinus Proteus.
If Diogenes was doing an act he was really into it.
He famously told Alexander the Great to fuck off and stop blocking the light (which leads me to think that the ultimate "fuck you money" is to have no money at all, and not want any).
He would also walk around the market and masturbate in public, which the Athenians found disgraceful. When challenged about this he would reply: how happy would we be if we were able to suppress hunger simply by rubbing our belly.
A lot of this is probably apocryphal. He was such an outrageous character that people seem to have used him as a trope when telling jokes, he was a living fictional character and seems to have enjoyed fanning on the stories about him. This is sort of central to the accusation too, he seems to have really reveled in his infamy and no doubt encouraged these stories.
Like the exchange with Alexander, which is questionable if it ever happened or whether it's just an anecdote that went "viral". A tale of how the world's most powerful general hashing words with the world's most impudent homeless man, it's both entertaining and inspires the imagination. A bit like a superman vs batman fight.
So, assuming this isn't just a rumour spread by Diogenes himself....
Diogenes' barrel was in the middle of Corinth, where he could be seen & talked about. Where he could be vocally cynical of other people, etc. If Diogenes really wanted to be left alone, fill his belly and nap... he could have done this easily.
Many Greek well-to-dos in his place did just retired to a quiet country life where no one bothers you. He didn't, wanting to be seen not giving a fuck.
I wonder if like modern counter cultural figures, his fan base tended to be late teens?
Well if he had zero money he couldn't retire to a quiet country life... That's why homeless people today do not choose to live in nice places in the countryside but instead sleep on the pavement in cities. It's much less pleasant but you starve less in the city.
Also, maybe he wanted to tell other people they were fools, not just "wanting to be seen not giving a fuck".
Sure, if you want to lecture people about themselves then you give a fuck about at least that, but it's different than simply trying to be the center of attention.
I really think Diogenes was a philosopher (Diogenes the character -- this is true whether he actually existed or not): he had a point of view that he wanted to share.
Diogenes (the character) was a famous, upper class dude. Lifelong poverty wasn't a trap he couldn't escape.
Also I didn't mean to be too harsh. The "can't wait to tell you how little I care" trope is one we can't escape even in modern dissident youth culture. Hippies, punk, goth, emo... every generation reinvents it and it's artistically/culturally rich ground.
That said, the Diogenes character definitely does seem like he enjoyed being the centre of attention. It's like Marilyn Manson going on daytime talk shows in the 90s to tell normies that he doesn't care what they think. There's obviously a falsity in there, somewhere. It got my attention though, as a teen, and I still listen to th albums.
The point of the barrel is to be seen in a barrel, at the very least to demonstrate the philosophical reasoning for the barrel.
There are plenty of people who genuinely don't care what the people of Corinth think, say or do. The don't choose to spend their time in the public square debating.
This "care what you think" phrasing I think is really deceptive. Because the active issue is whether you conform to group norms or refuse to do so.
If someone refuses to conform to a group, then demonstrably they don't care enough about the benefits of group inclusion to comply with the group demands.
If someone quits their job, they may in _some_ sense "care what the boss thinks," but there is a much more important sense in which they don't (while those who do not quit, do).
I guess people may be "loud" about their refusal, in various ways, because they don't want a refusal to conform to be mistaken for an inability to perform. Much like the person who is quitting does not want to be perceived as having been fired. Again, that is a very different kind of concern than the person who is trying to keep their job.
There can be cultural moments, relationship moments, etc. where the exact same thing may register as a lame "can't wait to tell you how little I care" or a much needed bit of stridency... a la chuck berry, john lennon or courtney love.
Edge Lord is the pejorative to something with a very flattering synonym, though we might argue what that synonym is.
> He famously told Alexander the Great to fuck off and stop blocking the light (which leads me to think that the ultimate "fuck you money" is to have no money at all, and not want any).
Many historians think this anecdote is apocryphal, giving credence to the opinion that Diogenes' act was... an act.
It may be possible, that the pirates who captured Diogenes were not the same as those who captured Servantes. You may have to differentiate your approach and adjust it to the specific type of pirates, if captured by pirates...
>Another good quote for the OP is Miguel De Cervantes, author if Don Quixote: "there is madness in too much sanity, and the greatest madness of all is to see things as they are instead of as they should be".
I admire heroes but I don't want to be one. I rather live a happy life than be another sad story who inspires people.
> In a world fit for cynics, you have to be ready for things to go right if you want to escape.
That is open to challenge - it might be that cynics have an advantage because they are better at biding their time until an opportunity arises. And are less likely to be demoralised because they are used to dealing with the general difficulty of it all.
It isn't like Cervantes had a fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. Don Quixote, as a great book, appeals to the views of cynics just as much as anyone else.
That quote reminds me of the song _Bright Horses_, by Nick Cave (who lost his son to a tragic accident some years before).
"We're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are / Horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire / The fields are just fields, and there ain't no Lord"
and later
"Oh, oh, oh, well, this world is plain to see / It don't mean we can't believe in something, and anyway / My baby's coming back now on the next train / I can hear the whistle blowing, I can hear the mighty roar / I can hear the horses prancing in the pastures of the Lord"
For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people can gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which is natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame, and even flouting conventions openly and derisively in public. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.
When you’ve been scammed, disappointed, heartbroken, cheated out, beaten up too many times in life, you will approach new things with cynicism.
So many times things in life do not live up to expectations. Often you think you’re interacting with someone but really you’re just interacting with their ego, there is no genuine connection. They build up a rapport with you so they could later cash in on their influence and make you hand over what they really want.
The general incompetence of society, the proud ignorance of people who have dug themselves into holes, it makes you look like an asshole for not fitting in, just for minding your own business and doing what’s best for you. How can one not be a cynic in this kind of world? Everything new you come across is likely to disappoint.
Unfortunately I'm not sure offhand where that saying originated, but I think it is true, at least for me.
I'll spare you a lecture on it because, believe me, I'm no expert. But it is an expression I try to remind myself of from time to time to cope with people and things that might anger me.
Nothing wrong with having expectations. Things are supposed to be good. Marriages are supposed to be forever. Justice is supposed to be done. Politicians are supposed to be honest. Governments are supposed to look out for us. Companies are supposed to provide good products and services.
Obviously reality falls short of expectations no matter what we do. Enough disappointment will demoralize anyone. It will shatter their understanding of the world, their sense of right and wrong, of cause and effect. Cynicism is born when the disturbing realities become the new expectations. Cynicists expect the world to keep disappointing them.
I didn't mean to say it was wrong to have expectations.
I should have elaborated I guess, but tried to keep it short.
I have high expectations for people and things that are important and close to me, and low expectations for things not as important to me or out of my control.
It doesn't mean I don't care about some of those other things at all. It's just that I only have a limited amount of mental and emotional energy to spend, and I try to spend it wisely.
Edit: hmm, maybe I'm sort of a cynic if I have low expectations. But I don't really think of myself that way. I try to be optimistic and focus on things I can do and not dwell on what I can't.
You seem to be focussing very much on the problems with other people, and with society. It is true that society has major problems and that, in your life, you will regularly encounter predators of all stripes. And that those predators apparently enjoy comfort, success and even admiration that others find difficult to access.
But on the other hand, I would feel pretty sad if it is the case that you (or anyone) are so consumed by this that you cannot find joy or purpose in your own life.
Sometimes it is the more profitable strategy to realise and accept that it is very difficult or impossible for one person to fix the major and obvious failings with reality. But it is actually quite achievable, through introspection and rational thinking, to identify and modify our own reactions to those things when our reactions are negatively impacting our ability to experience a quota of joy and happiness that is sufficient to keep negative ruminations about the world to a manageable level.
At the end of the day, we are just animals. And for whatever reason, nature has seen to it that we are quite capable of experiencing a reasonable amount of joy and happiness just by going through the activities required of us to sustain our lives. Breathing, drinking, eating, moving around, fighting, cooperating, resting, attempting to reproduce, and so on.
If it were not so, then what would be the likelihood of our continuing to be here? Given that we must go through many years of this stuff, without giving up, in order to pass on our genetic material before we either kill ourselves or die.
Ah, yes. Another "guru" confusing skepticism with cynicism.
People are usually resistant to change, because 95% of ideas to change something are laughably bad, or not well thought out.
If you find yourself talking to too many "cynics", then the problem is you! Propose better ideas, that don't sound ridiculous or too far-fetched. Present them with a detailed plan to achieve win-win goals.
This is an important point. One of the things I really disliked about life in Italy was the cynical, defeatist attitude prevalent among certain people. "All the politicians are corrupt", "nothing will ever change", "why bother trying, they won't let anything happen", and so on and so forth. I realized it's a great way to ensure that nothing happens or changes.
But what do I mean by being cynical? When you’re conversing with someone, it often easy to detect the frame through which they view the world and the interaction with you. Cynics think that the world is never changing on a fundamental level, but it only changes cosmetically, and superficially. Cynics may look at some new trend and call it “lipstick on a pig”. According to cynics, the world operates in a certain way, the elites are always the same, and will always be the same. The cynics think we are always playing the same game that has always been played. For example, a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers - like I did here. And often they might be right.
What is wrong with that. I would rather be a cynic and have the correct framing of the world than be too optimistic and deluded. Success at investing for example requires looking at things objectively.
It's also so much more complicated than this. I've known more than one person who didn't act as a cynic, they outwardly preached and proselytized this sort of "change the world" viewpoint, in order to attract attention and twitter followers. In a professional context they wanted to play the part of a "visionary" or whatever, and always acted positive about change. Yet, if you really get to know them and manage to ask the right question in a vulnerable moment, you would suddenly realize that their internal worldview is just about as cynical as it's possible to be.
I wonder if folks say the same about me. It's possible to see the imperfections in the world, and yet be positive about how we operate in a world that's full of them. And no, they will never go away. Until sentience disappears, dissatisfaction will remain. But it doesn't have to mean anger, negativity, or cynicism.
It has been my experience that the skill to be outwardly "visionary" and at the same time remain cynic at heart gets rewarded most handsomely, especially in corporate world. We all have been in those meetings, town halls and off-sites where all the right, inspiring words are routinely uttered and amazing examples of leadership are described. Yet, once you exit the meeting room and actually work with and get to know those leaders - you quickly realize that it is cold, hard, calculating cynicism (and thus true understanding of reality) is what that drives their (sometimes "behind the scenes") actions and results in conquering the corporate ladder. My personal level of respective incompetence has been reached when I found myself unable to spew that BS with conviction from a podium.
Cassandra was always right, and always powerless to change anything. If you are speculating (not investing) and nothing more, then sure, you only want to see what is.
If you're creating, executing, advising, or actually investing, anchoring on what "is" risks losing to competition that suffers no such limitations.
If you believe you have no power to change things, then it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can change things, you might be wrong. Which game you prefer to play is up to you.
No body blankly believes nothing can be changed, or believes everything can be changed. The two extremes are both obviously wrong. It's just important to understand what you can change and what you can't. So the starting point is about understanding how the world works, not just daydreaming.
If you're understanding is based on what's been observed before, you will never progress beyond it.
During the Enlightenment, all this science stuff looked extremely stupid. If people didn't persevere through the cynicism, we wouldn't have advanced the way we did.
Hmm. It seems quite obvious that, to the common person in that time period, science would have seemed like an irrelevant waste of time. Some cursory googling doesn't reveal much either way.
I'm not super confident in my speculation, it just seems the most likely to me. What makes you so confident?
Deluded self-assurance most reliably delivers success. Cynics and realists tend to not understand this and thus don't take enough risks when they should, and are confined to mediocre results (compared to their peers in similar situations).
> Deluded self-assurance most reliably delivers success.
I don't believe so. However I do believe that projecting a deluded self-assuring aura helps convince people to follow you, but that doesn't mean that your internals acts that way. It is really hard to know what people really think underneath that facade, I am pretty sure much more is going on that people want to show.
There are people that have remarkably positive outlooks on life and that allows them to do the daily grind that's necessary to achieve any semblance of change. A lot of people, seeing that you can actually progress in life, are moved by such personalities and find them inspiring.
That doesn't mean a person isn't sad, or can't get depressed, or not get seriously set back in life. It just means that pushing on and hoping for change can actually get you somewhere.
Everyone always deludes oneself. Even cynics and realists end up having their own versions of the reality. Also, risk, success, and financial success are completely irrelevant to each other, thus cynical attitude really has nothing to do with it.
> a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers
Thinking this makes me a cynic? I don't think so. This is a fact that gets proven right every day on the internet. If anything I'm a hopelessly deluded optimist who thinks the web can actually go back to its pure beginnings when people said what they wanted without worrying that some advertiser will pull their funding.
Yes, it is cynical to see only this side of the coin.
What about passionate creators who use advertising as a means to finance their vocation? What about the wide informational and educational value of media?
> It's great but also a relatively tiny minority of all content. A niche really. And even those tend have ads.
I disagree.
And even if it was true, why do you care? I mean, I watch almost only this kind of videos on YouTube - documentaries, education (learning German ATM), infotainment and there's a huge amount of it. Niche or not, there is still more than enough quality content to watch 24h/day.
Word of mouth. When some new business opens, people notice and tell their friends. Also, sometimes people will ask to be advertised to. When I enter a store, I'm looking to buy stuff so go ahead and show me the stuff. I don't actually think of these as advertising at all. One is friends telling me about cool stuff while the other is the business doing what I explicitly asked of them.
The problems start when people start trying to sell my attention to the highest bidder. That's unacceptable. My attention is not theirs to sell. Not once did I consent to having information forcibly injected into my mind. I will resist it to the bitter end no matter the consequences.
That was the model for traditional media, as well.
Newspaper prices only covered a fraction of their costs, their most valuable products were the pages. Each page would have a different cost for ads (first page - super high price, second page - quite high, last page - also high, etc.).
I agree. It's critical to have a crystal-clear view of the world than wrap yourself with sweet dream. Failing to do so will easily make the one look away from root problems deep in the ground, and concentrate on the surface issues. Cynics, on the other hand, hates the world, thus have no problem with overturning the entire stack built on top of the anyway-broken foundation.
Also, it's wrong to assume that cynicism leads to negative and passive attitudes. Cynics often bring bigger improvements faster than what people with positive attitude ever can, because, guess what, things suck. Being a cynic only means the one is negative about the current state and direction, and one can still be positive about the ideal state that the one believes in. Once that ideal is set, cynics can be the most fierce fighter for their own ideals.
Yet, for cynics to make progresses, it's important to get out of their own sweet spot and start moving. Ones who only love talking deserves all the criticism.
Most of the ultra successful people I've known were optimists in speech, cynics in action.
Best to participate in the theatre. Once you play a role long enough but also seem "pragmatic" in action, others of the same ilk will find you and invite you behind the curtain.
Right. Gotta do what you can to have the elites notice you and invite you for an initiation ritual into their kooky cult of deeply cynical hypocrisy. Great way to live, right?
I think the OP (and some other people saying the same thing) are tired of all the criticism coming through the internet. Being unable to specifically name the aggressive audience, those people are just called cynics or pessimists, clearly based on their behaviors. However, to my eyes, it's just a whole bunch trolls, thus it's just an internet noise. I don't think there's anything we can do with it...
I'm pretty sure I fall into the definition of a cynic given in the piece
"according to cynics, the world operates in a certain way, the elites are always the same, and will always be the same. The cynics think we are always playing the same game that has always been played. For example, a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers - like I did here. And often they might be right."
but I too be honest don't really see the problem with that kind of worldview. I'm not chronically depressed or antagonistic because of it, but I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
"One of the strongest medicines against cynical mindset which I’ve tried is to do a “no-complain challenge”. I find its effects to be enormous and durable for years. In this challenge, you move a bracelet from one wrist to the other when you catch yourself complaining. The goal is to make it 21 days without having move the wrist. "
Before you start prescribing medicine we need to agree that cynicism is an illness first, which is not so easily done. I think the author conflates people who are sort of angry or pessimistic because of their lot in life with his definition of a cynic. I take the cynical view because of what I perceive are fundamental aspects of human nature collectively, not my mood personally. I can beat that challenge without a problem because I rarely complain, or win the lottery tomorrow and it wouldn't really have an impact of my views on the way the world operates overall.
Thanks for the personal take, a lot of people would couch that perspective in abstract terms or attack the piece.
I see cynicism as coming from alienation, lack of alignment, "alone in a crowd" type of thing.
I start thinking cynically when I have a problem that I don't trust other people with, and feel like I can't solve on my own.
Cynicism is a form of having outcome independence. I can only change what is in my control. The forces of zealots, the paranoid, the corrupt, sociopaths, and benevolent dictators will keep swarming around in a cacophony until long after I'm dead. I choose to let it ruin my day on a regular basis, or I can find inner happiness.
Definitely. I see myself as a cynic, but I also don't find cynicism compulsive like the author suggests. If someone asks me to stop being cynical, or a situation calls for less reductive voices in the room, I have no problem shutting up and simply listening to people. Mentally, I can still digest the conversation around me and operate normally, but acting like it's some kind of disorder is a silly exaggeration, plain and simple.
IMO cynicism is not a problem on an individual level.
It’s when the group has a lot of cynics is when we have a problem. Have you ever had to work with a group of “low energy” people? They’re not only just low energy — they’re energy vampires.
Wouldn’t it also be applicable to a lot of intrinsically problematic situations ?
For instance if you had to direct an “employees right” course in a strongly anti-union company, you’d have “low energy” people looking at you with dead eyes, and you’d be complaining they suck your energy too. But is it really a problem outside of the scope of your course ?
The converse is true, too. It’s absolutely sapping working with folks who’ll just repeat bullshit and call you a cynic for trying to helpfully point out the flaws in their thinking.
There is a very real difference between constructive criticism and simply complaining. In most cases, complaining and shutting people down without suggesting any possible alternative or improvement just makes the situation even less unpleasant for everyone.
Sometimes complaining means acknowledging that a problem exists even if you don't know the solution. Pointing out problems is valuable too. On the other and the people[1] who "opt out of cynicism" generally want to live in the "best of the possible world" where problems just disappear if don't look at them.
[1] that I've met and interacted with, of course there's a sampling bias.
I think there's a general failure of communication here, and throughout the current social discourse on "cynicism".
There's a sort of false trichotomy at play in this post, and on Twitter I've noticed a dichotomous version: "Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?" (That's my summary of it, anyway)
Why not both? We should appreciate how far things have come (it is truely astounding), but of course that doesn't imply that we should be content with where we are. We should be deeply discontent - at least to the extent that it motivates us to fight towards a better future. A magnitude or type of discontent that leads to depression/apathy is obviously not helpful.
It seems like a significant portion of tribal "controversy" on social media is stoked by mouthpieces on either side that are almost purposefully playing into the dichotomy perspective, because adding subtlety into the discussion would throw water on the flames, and that's just ending the "fun".
I think this comment is a good example of a type of cynicism that we're discussing, probably the type that most instinctively jumps out as "cynical."
Like pessimism and optimism, cynicism often boils down to a bias.
The key word is "just" (virtue signalling). Blogging, commenting, and communicating generally are various things as once. We're pursuing intellectual curiosity, showing off, participating in a culture, signalling virtue, signalling other things... to ourselves and to others.
Our bias and/or perspective lens dictates our focus. A lot of cynicism, certainly within my generational cohort, is also about signalling. Signaling that we're not naive, that we're cool, grunge, etc. If you hate grunge, hippies, Diogenes or whatnot, you're more likely to adopt a perspective whereby they're "just" bunch of virtue signaling posers.
You can always plausibly adopt this perspective. Grunge, hippies, Diogenes & whatnot are attention seekers. They are cultural figures, which is kind of virtue signalling by definition. They're also other things though. Reducing these to "just" virtue signalling is cynicism regarding these things.
You can also have a general cynical viewpoint, but it's pretty hard to do without also adopting arseholery. As a general cynic, you pretty much assume that base motivation for everything. OP is just virtue-signalling optimism. Drewcoo is just edgelord cool-signalling. Netcan is just cool-signaling.
I think what is true from reading reddit, HN & the internet broadly is that cynicism is very "in" right now, to the point where it's annoying. Hence, I suppose, why such posts do well.
It's signaling something, but not virtue: criticism implies expertise. People observe the respect experts get and start imitating the behavior. Since they don't have anything actually insightful to add, they fall back on generic opposition to everything, also called cynicism.
It's cargo-culting for non-(non-?)academia. HN, the world's #1 source of smartitude, may just be its purest crystallization.
"Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?"
A hardcore cynic might say, there is no improvement, only change. We might have come so far with some things, but lost or destroyed so many others in exchange.
> I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
You say that but a realistic and true view of the world will show that things have indeed changed for the better for a lot of marginalized people -- and within our lifetimes, too. It's definitely not "always the same", to paraphrase the author. If you think it is, you may be the kind of person the author is referring to.
I agree with you completely. I think that I am also a cynic based on this article but certainly an optimistic cynic. I believe fully that things can but we will have to work together(which is admittedly a very difficult thing to do) and also be very smart about the changes we make. I would argue that choosing to ignore the reality of things and to not be cynical would ultimately make change harder to achieve. Working smarter not harder, after all.
I'm not chronically depressed or antagonistic because of it, but I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
I knew some cynical folks and you do not seem to be one of them. The criteria is not how objectively you view the world, but how you act on it. E.g. someone “redirects” the train of medicine for troops in a conflict, because anybody would do that if it wasn’t them (and spent this money on things much worse than they planned). Someone figuratively spits onto a guy operating a gate, because he didn’t choose to have a good time in his life anyway.
And they are right – that train would never make it to its destination, and a gate operator made a mistake in their career. But once you accept that as how the world works naturally, it’s easy to just go and take it, cause you’re not that bad, bad is the world. That is cynical. Simply seeing things as they are is not.
One of the strongest medicines against cynical mindset which I’ve tried is to do a “no-complain challenge” (from tfa)
I don’t know, maybe it works for them, but if I would no-complain everyday, I believe I’d become cynical AF. Our local prisoners have the rule: do not seek the truth, i.e. do not complain about anything, it is what it is. Everyone experiences it and your problem is irrelevant. This teaches them to live on their own, ignore any unfairness, and get whatever they can whenever they can. Long-term convicts basically live by these rules.
Of course there are levels of cynicism, and maybe it’s all about moderate levels of it, not extreme ones.
Interesting post. I think cynicism is both about how you view the world and how you act in it, because the former informs the latter. So to me cynicism is both a view of the world broadly, I think of it sort of as Hobbesian, empirical and realistic rather than idealistic and certain ways to act individually. A sort of Machiavellian personality type is to me a pragmatic form of cynicism.
To take the prison example. I guess a cynical person would say, yes, complaining makes no sense because if you loudly complain the guards just beat you up. Staging a prison revolt is just going to give you more years and the justice system is screwed as well. The prison is a zero sum environment and you're likely only going to get ahead by screwing over someone else, and being deceptive and clever.
And honestly to me that's a fairly accurate description of actual prisons in most places. Cynics tend to be people who are acutely aware of power and how people leverage it for their own interests, but I don't think it implies that one has to resign from life.
If you continuously call all politicians equally corrupt, they have no incentive not to be. You and the people you influence will have no justification based in reality for the decisions you get to make, like voting. That’s the end of democracy.
The author sounds like an apologete of "Four temperaments" theory. He believes cynic == someone who believes in "no change" and complains a lot. Then he labels people as either "cynics" or not. It is as simple as that. (BTW, that is not the definition of a cynic at all)
Human personalities are extremely complicated, and the best you can do is correlate traits given a huge amount of data which he probably does not have. So we have him boasting a theory, that is likely based on the fundamental attribution errors in his experiences, and people, who vote his post up, who happen to have a similar sentiment with a few anecdata (who would also probably disregard any anti-anecdata in this thread).
So is the nature of most Internet posts about psychology.
It's hard, when say, twitter tries to ban you when you suggest that obvious seditionists should be put in front of a firing squad, as they obviously should.
All the best outcomes exist in the additive economic space. We have reflected this in the mathematical evidence for cooperation.
Cynicism and nihilism are emotionally easy excuses not to try that lead to a variety of impoverishments. [Edit: they are conveniently self reinforcing too.]
ITT: Instead of being an overt narcissist, be a covert narcissist! :)
An apparently popular and easy way not to complain about problems is to simply stop yourself from perceiving them. The bigger the problems get, and the more you are confronted with them, while you forbid yourself from recognising that any conflict exists, the more it begins to look like the problem is your own lack of faith or "positivity". So the worse things get, the more you double down on your faith by putting increasing amounts of energy in to maintaining a delusional belief system designed to deal with problems or conflicts by explaining them away as an internal problem with yourself or your own emotional tate.
Does this sound like a recipe for improving your situation? Or anyone's situation?
To me, it sounds much more like a reliable method for the cultivation of increasingly bizarre thoughts and erratic behaviour.
What if you, instead, did the bracelet trick for every time you avoided a confrontation with the world that you know is necessary? What if you just console yourself with the fact the the world has problems and the vast majority of them cannot be solved by you (since you are not the omnipotent force)? You do realise that you don't have to stop caring about the problems, right? You know that it's just not worth investing energy in to worrying about things that are completely out of your control, right? That isn't cynicism, it's the picture postcard of mental health.
The reason is, you have pre-decided an emotional polarity and you're consciously expending effort to compulsively fit the reality to the emotional polarity that you desire. That is the opposite way round to what you need if you desire both accurate perception AND healthy emotional regulation.
I think that's a common misconception I hear a lot. You are completely right about the way you are looking at it, but imho it's the other way around: noticing confrontation instead of avoiding it. It's not about thinking "this is fine' about everything. It's way more mental work do think about reasons why some things are the way they are, rather than just labeling at as bad or broken and therefore dismissing it. Finding the purpose of the current problematic situation is step 1, then you can go ahead and tackle it with another solution that achieves the goal differently (and hopefully in a better way for most people, but that's only my personal belief).
a family member went through a traumatic substance abuse incident a few years back and went to rehab. when he came back, what you're describing here was his new, apparently instilled mindset toward life. ignore unhappy things, enjoy happy things, begin to exhibit increasingly, worryingly, alienatingly bizarre/erratic behavior, arguably worse than the initial (legal) substance abuse. this mindset seems to be the new generalized prescription these days and I hate it.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadhow to avoid cynicism? the primary way is to remove cynics from your life, and add optimists. second to that, keep working on new enough areas that you maintain a beginners mindset and can offset some of the pattern matching that leads one to thinking everything worthwhile has been done before.
If I talk about the things I dislike, I am flooded with imaginary internet points.
Now, here are some other things I hate about it...
Steve helped me unshackle myself; kick-started a thinking about what values were really important to me, not just professionally, but what kind of a person I wanted to be amid the environment in which I am thrown. The corporate capitalist world (& to a lesser degree the young-guns-ultra-productive engineering departments) deserves deep cynicism. I've heard so many good & great intents put off, and so many wild betterments ignored. But Steve helped me find an inner stoic that insisted on, that demanded- that believed in- progress, in other engineers, in trying for extra, in myself, in doing good, even when it probably wasn't going to be convenient or easy. Engineering is filled with cynicism & this made clear what a spectrum our opinions lay across, laid bare how cynical, how pessimistic most of the world about me was.
I endeavor to help & support others, to try for good, in ways that I would never have thought about for reading Notes from the Magic Bus. I still await such a clear & obvious life-changing post appearing ever again. This one's alright. But it doesn't deal close enough with the conflict, with how horrid it can be, suffering the un-smart gumption of the erring-do-wellers. It helped convince me to try to help see things along a lot, even if the picks & choices aren't necessarily totally what I would do. To be optimistic, not just in my own sphere, but in working with others. Please, read. Let me, let us know what you think.
[1] https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
I can safely say that I have never as a programmer implemented a feature that I thought made anyone's life better. My software has consistently turned the screws in on people's lives, either in their work life by making monotonous internal tools or in their personal life by removing autonomy and choice. I take magicians and turn them into mechanical Turks. I take people and turn them into consumers/users/addicts.
This isn't supposed to be a diatribe, just contributing my N=1 that Notes from the Magic Bus seems cute and superficial to me, defending the culture of office politics by elevating it to the importance of actual politics.
Shouldn't you take a systemic approach? Individuals can do lots of things, but until it turns systemic, is there a reason to adopt this negativity-first mindset? (And even then, I think OP makes a good case for why one shouldn't.) Kids were shitty to me in middle school, but I don't think I should indemnify all of humanity because of that.
These aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible for something to be bad _for you_ but not be bad _for everyone_, especially if there are particular circumstances around you that cause the experience to be bad. It's like deciding never to date again after a bad relationship (which certainly has crossed the minds of friends of mine). It's not about changing yourself, it's about keeping an open mind.
Well said.
Plenty of new things are important developments, even when there are selfish actors behind them. But also plenty of new things are just scams.
I don't think most engineering departments & product-development-organizations give anywhere near a fair shake to doing good, to trying for better. There's so many meetings called to discuss options, to try to suss out where to go, that revolve around mistrust, that are simply a hunt for security. And there's a good chance these hunts for security are right, that mediocrity would better serve us all. But theres ongoing & persistent resistance, un-understanding of better, that pervades, and I'd like to see a little more optimism, a little more shared idea of possibility about. I think there's a lot of possibility that we consign away, a lot of true organizational excellence (& personal glory along with it) that the easier/safer paths ignore.
I also think HN is a classic, key demonstration of cynicism. I feel like a lot of new ideas presented get slammed, that the critics have a field day. I'd love a broad asssessment of positive/negative valence of posts. My gut feeling is that the novel gets extremely hostile reception here. Someone combined mutable torrents with webtorrent[1], & there felt like such vast continuing cynicism, such "what are the use cases?", such tearing it down, such disbelief & resistance. This just feels like one of endless countless examples of cyncism & disbelief, such desire to disregard, to put the new, potential, positives into a box that can be safely disregarded. This to me is the poison we swallow.
For sure. 100%. Be wary of what people are selling. Be wary of the power-grabbing. But I think we ought try to wire ourselves to be positive if we can. We should look for the tell-tale signs, & try to promote & support the potentially good, the things that may have merit, to have optimism. While calling out the specific delusions & exploitionations that may be afoot.
It's a balancing. But we should try, try try try, to find optimism. Just not without disregarding reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/publiusfed... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547
> The internet (well, just worldwide connectivity IMO) has turned cynicism into a social signaling mechanism, it's not just HN.
We're cutting to the punch here, but: a lot of the thing you are about to list sound less like "the internet" & more like general society waking up & understanding what's less than optimal.
> make a "hot take" against US democrats,
They're pretty useless absolutely but the opposition has been stalwartly effective. Bernie wasn't that far off from being president & even though he's far outside the current party, the core consitutents desire far far more from this party. A lot of democrats-the-people loath the uselessnessness. Hot takes are deserved against any party that has gotten so little done. But also, most democrats are pretty sympathetic to how impossible the situation has been, how constitutionally rigged everything has been against them getting any chance to do anything. It's been decade after decade of democrats having zero actual chance to pass anything meaningful, other than, say, Romneycare. the demorat's are slammable but we all know there's not in many's lifetime been a single chance to determine whether they're actually useful or not.
> CRT, cryptocurrencies, management, VCs, capitalism,
Mostly deserved & out of touch higher echelon's detached from ground truth. The one exception IMO: I don't see any dunking against Critical Race Theory (CRT)s that doesn't come off as maligning & poisonous. There's no popular way to be anti-woke, yay.
> pastafarianism
Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
To return to our seeming core disagreement, you said:
> Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications to your in-group:
This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> it's not just HN. Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications... you'll get all your fellow in-group folks upvoting/retweeting/liking your "hot take". IMO this is the greatest threat of all
I've walked point by point through how I don't see your listed examples as bad or hazarous or cynical. There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better. And...
I don't mean to say that any of these in particular are or are not hostile, dangerous, or negative. They were examples of issues that people like to have "dunks" or "hot takes" on.
> Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
I'm not trying to sort these into sides. That's my point.
> This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
> It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better.
The long rut of what, on what time scale, when? When was it "better" and when did it become "worse"? It wasn't that long ago that McCarthyism was used to bully political sides, when the US and the Soviet Union propped up brutal puppet regimes to fight proxy wars, when Africa/India/China was divided into an arbitrary map of colonial powers, when queer folks were unacceptable in the general public while being ruthlessly bullied (and this continues to this day!) in private, when Muslims/Arabs/South Asians were regularly frisked in Western airports, when people of color had their lives ruined for the possession of token amounts of recreational drugs. It's always been this way.
My point has nothing to do with either "side". That some of these are negative things by some and positive things by other is also something that I understand and accept. My point is that, when you create group-identity, you begin to get dialogue like "because fuck capitalism" that gets many upvotes/shares/engagement, instead of nuanced arguments like "there's no recourse for labor to fall back onto when management manipulates them". What that does is it crowds out the voices of people interested in novel ideas ("what if I get dunked on for being socialist/capitalist/Georgist/whatever") and shifts the dialogue away from problems and solutions into in-group signaling ("yeah I'm gonna upvote all the anti-capitalist posts because f*** the 1%!"). It's a culture that makes people defensive and adversarial ("ugh I wanna see what IPFS is all about but they're associated with Filecoin which is crypto and all my friends hate crypto so I shouldn't") instead of supportive and uplifting. It also then incenitivizes people ("huh I get lots of upvotes when I hate on <X>, so I should keep doing it") to keep up the cycle of hot takes. When cynicism meets group-identity politics, you get IMO the worst case.
I personally found it hard to separate the two for many year, and fell in the pattern of unifying them. Cynical outlook has been a helpful protecting mechanism, though no longer as useful, as I'm trying to find and play more win-win games.
There are some things that really don't change, and I guess that can be a source of cynicism. The poor will always be among you, lying politicians, the greedy rich, etc. But I'd argue that isn't cause for inaction, quite the opposite, though I can see nihilists just retreating to their beds in despair.
Re: things that really don't change, I'd say "until they do". Plenty of examples in history where the whole system switches to a different equilibrium point (for example as in "Inadequate Equilibria" book).
When I'm referring to cynicism, I'm talking about the difference between the mindset of "these will never change", vs "these are attractor points in the current social system, which all history so far have been used, but the system may have other equilibriums and solutions for which X=`the rich are not greedy`".
Hope that's helpful!
The things that don't change I refer to, I really mean human nature, and I really think that doesn't change much. Some people just want to watch the world burn, etc, some people are greedy, narcissistic, lazy, psychotic, etc.
The cause for optimism, is that we can change society to better deal with the nature of the beast, bring out the best, and suppress the ugly. There's lots of work to do!
We live in a world on near limitless abundance. We already live in a potential post-scarcity world.
The only reason there are poor among us IS the greedy rich; but the greedy rich isn't some faceless, abstract, unkillable cosmic god. They have names and addresses; what they have can be taken from them as has happened many many times throughout history.
Things can change, sometimes slowly, sometimes incredibly quickly.
We have seen the impossible become inevitable over and over in the last few decades, and yet it still seems impossible for people to imagine the "impossible". I wonder if there is a name for that sort of fallacious thinking.
The opportunity is to make the currency of that hierarchy something far above basic needs, IMHO. Perhaps this could be a genuine use-case for cryptocurrencies, so that the ultra wealthy can 'keep score' in maths, rather than mega-yachts, private jets, dark satanic mills, etc.
Only if you ignore every society that that ever existed without a strict economic hierarchy, sure.
I consider myself an anarchist, as in, against unnecessary hierarchy, yet I still believe some hierarchy is inevitable, even necessary and desirable.
The viewpoint that says "why bother looking" is cynicism, I think. This is the viewpoint that says "all optimistic messages are power grabbing schemes." And it is a really disempowering and hopeless way of viewing the world.
I think it is better to keep looking behind the curtain. There's got to be something good back there.
IMO that's not being cynical. That's actually an universally positive trait: being able to spot power-grabbing schemes.
The problem with the negative side of cynicism described in the article is that, (to follow your example) the power-grabbing scheme is not the thing being detected, but rather the display of optimism. Every display of optimism is treated as being a power-grabbing scheme, or worse, naivety.
The things cynics end up attacking in the end isn't the power grabbing per se, but the optimism.
The answer is not to attack everything optimistic, but also neither to attack nothing. Life is hard.
Then, there are clearly two things being called cynicism here.
Arguing that the author is wrong because X is good when the author is actually talking about Y is a fruitless exercise.
> Perhaps as one studies history they find that all forms of positive change conceivable by mere humans have been co-opted and are accounted for in the extremely energetic struggle of the system to remain alive, as it has been selected for very much Darwinistically.
That still doesn't and won't ever mean that positive change is negative. If you're still throwing the baby with a bathwater, you're the bad kind of cynic.
https://imgur.com/gallery/GUcVw
Edit: Think there is an element of fatalism to it (nothing changes) that the article doesn’t touch in though
Its not that complaining has no place, its just that most complaining is is the lowest common denominator and doesn’t contribute much.
He would know: Cervantes killed a rival on a duel at 17 and fled to sea. They were attacked by pirates and he fought well before getting his hand blown off and taken prisoner. He lived in captivity but befriended his captor, who taught him chess and literacy. Then he was "rescued" by monks who bought his freedom but placed him on indentured servitude through debt, which he finally escaped by writing one of the early great novels.
The point of this story is not that cynics were wrong but that one never would have survived his ordeal. In a world fit for cynics, you have to be ready for things to go right if you want to escape.
I suppose his ending wasn't the greatest, but Dante placed his betrayers into a special place in literary hell.
0: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-time-julius-caesar-was-...
His upbringing was nothing like that of what were probably children the dirt poor farmers.
He was lucky that no one snapped (I imagine some did but the thought of such a huge amount of money meant that everyone was kept in line) and the rest is just a bold and vengeful ultra rich, ultra privileged person getting their revenge.
I don't think you can retcon modern thinking on it, he was the actual thing and that was beautiful and terrible.
As another commoner you'd probably get gutted like a fish if you'd try the same thing.
Which is complete and utter nonsense. Sure, it makes for nice advertising for Frankl's Logotherapy shtick but it's not an accurate picture of what happened in the camps.
Been a while since I read it, but iirc one of his examples is of fellow captives telling themselves they'll be free before the new year, then the new year comes, still not free, and those would be the first ones to go (your "giving up").
But the alternative I never took as "resisting" - but "purpose." Frankl's own purpose being the study of people under such extreme conditions, but his point (again, iirc) being that having that indefinite, daily, purpose is what keeps people alive and brings meaning.
Now, granted, it's been a while since I read it, but can you provide some color to this notion of "resisting" ? It'd be interesting if you took something completely different away from it (or if I remember it incorrectly and should be corrected.)
I will hazard a guess and say that nothing you have seen played out time and time again compares to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Your comment is a vacuous, bald assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick". Next time you comment, consider shedding light on the matter rather than merely smearing and adumbrating.
I also read and loved Frankl's book decades ago, and discovering something of the real story was highly disturbing. Also it seems that in actuality, positive mental attitude didn't keep you alive in the camps, although it sounds nice that it would. Survival was much more random. I believe people whose relatives died in the camps were/are highly offended by his suggestion that if only they'd had a better attitude they would've survived. It seems like victim blaming. The page also linked to a discussion of that, from memory. Sorry I don't have anything more concrete than that. It would be nice to restore links to those books, essays, etc to at least the talk page of Frankl's wikipedia page! Although it seemed like just Frankl's grandson deleting anything negative. (I haven't looked at Frankl's page for a year or 2, maybe it's changed)
[0] Finding out when Frankl's grandson (who has commented on the talk page I think) did his first edits, and looking just before that, might be a good way to find the old Controversy section.
Per the article, he spent years in concentration camps, but only a few days at Auschwitz.
Can you point to such an assertion in the GP?
To me, the idea that people died in concentration camps because they had bad attitudes is as nonsensical as suggesting gravity is a social construct. You might feel my dismissal needs more explanation. I respectfully disagree and this is a hill I'm willing to die on.
I distinctly remember that book saying that "THE BEST OF US DID NOT SURVIVE." Because to survive meant to make compromises.
I wasn't around for the US Civil war either but I can still tell you that the idea that it was about states' rights is nonsense.
> or did you have a superior strategy for survival?
Frankl already had a superior strategy. He made himself useful to the Nazis running the camps and was treated better than his fellow inmates.
> Your comment is a vacuous, bald assertion that Frankl is "nonesense" and his ideas were a "schtick"
Do you really want me to explain why the idea that people died in concentration camps because they had bad attitudes is nonsensical?
It's interesting you'd use that story to make your point because about 2,000 years earlier Diogenes, the founder of Cynicism, was supposedly captured by pirates on the Mediterranean and sold into slavery. Not only did he survive but the man who purchased him was so impressed that he appointed him to run his household and tutor his children.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosop...
A criticism that is as old as Diogenes (at least Laertius) is that they were essentially a cult of edgelords. They pretended not to care what people thought, but it was just an act, at the same time it was really important to them that people around them knew how little they cared through all the shockingly (lower case) cynical things they said and did. DL has Plato accuse Diogenes of this directly. All this is reducing a philosophy to a trope, but it's not an entirely unfair accusation either.
Speaking of which, a bizarre and entertaining piece of history is Lucian's extremely hostile biography of Peregrinus Proteus.
He famously told Alexander the Great to fuck off and stop blocking the light (which leads me to think that the ultimate "fuck you money" is to have no money at all, and not want any).
He would also walk around the market and masturbate in public, which the Athenians found disgraceful. When challenged about this he would reply: how happy would we be if we were able to suppress hunger simply by rubbing our belly.
I really love this character.
Like the exchange with Alexander, which is questionable if it ever happened or whether it's just an anecdote that went "viral". A tale of how the world's most powerful general hashing words with the world's most impudent homeless man, it's both entertaining and inspires the imagination. A bit like a superman vs batman fight.
Diogenes' barrel was in the middle of Corinth, where he could be seen & talked about. Where he could be vocally cynical of other people, etc. If Diogenes really wanted to be left alone, fill his belly and nap... he could have done this easily.
Many Greek well-to-dos in his place did just retired to a quiet country life where no one bothers you. He didn't, wanting to be seen not giving a fuck.
I wonder if like modern counter cultural figures, his fan base tended to be late teens?
Well if he had zero money he couldn't retire to a quiet country life... That's why homeless people today do not choose to live in nice places in the countryside but instead sleep on the pavement in cities. It's much less pleasant but you starve less in the city.
Also, maybe he wanted to tell other people they were fools, not just "wanting to be seen not giving a fuck".
Sure, if you want to lecture people about themselves then you give a fuck about at least that, but it's different than simply trying to be the center of attention.
I really think Diogenes was a philosopher (Diogenes the character -- this is true whether he actually existed or not): he had a point of view that he wanted to share.
Diogenes (the character) was a famous, upper class dude. Lifelong poverty wasn't a trap he couldn't escape.
Also I didn't mean to be too harsh. The "can't wait to tell you how little I care" trope is one we can't escape even in modern dissident youth culture. Hippies, punk, goth, emo... every generation reinvents it and it's artistically/culturally rich ground.
That said, the Diogenes character definitely does seem like he enjoyed being the centre of attention. It's like Marilyn Manson going on daytime talk shows in the 90s to tell normies that he doesn't care what they think. There's obviously a falsity in there, somewhere. It got my attention though, as a teen, and I still listen to th albums.
The point of the barrel is to be seen in a barrel, at the very least to demonstrate the philosophical reasoning for the barrel.
There are plenty of people who genuinely don't care what the people of Corinth think, say or do. The don't choose to spend their time in the public square debating.
This "care what you think" phrasing I think is really deceptive. Because the active issue is whether you conform to group norms or refuse to do so.
If someone refuses to conform to a group, then demonstrably they don't care enough about the benefits of group inclusion to comply with the group demands.
If someone quits their job, they may in _some_ sense "care what the boss thinks," but there is a much more important sense in which they don't (while those who do not quit, do).
I guess people may be "loud" about their refusal, in various ways, because they don't want a refusal to conform to be mistaken for an inability to perform. Much like the person who is quitting does not want to be perceived as having been fired. Again, that is a very different kind of concern than the person who is trying to keep their job.
Edge Lord is the pejorative to something with a very flattering synonym, though we might argue what that synonym is.
It's exactly the kind of professional career non-conformity that musicians are (literally) famous for.
Someone who was genuinely disinterested in group norms would disappear and do whatever they wanted to do in anonymous seclusion.
Is a murderer "interested in" the law against murder?
If they were "genuinely disinterested in the law against murder," they wouldn't kill?
It makes no sense. If there's a body, then the law didn't stop them.
Many historians think this anecdote is apocryphal, giving credence to the opinion that Diogenes' act was... an act.
I admire heroes but I don't want to be one. I rather live a happy life than be another sad story who inspires people.
That is open to challenge - it might be that cynics have an advantage because they are better at biding their time until an opportunity arises. And are less likely to be demoralised because they are used to dealing with the general difficulty of it all.
It isn't like Cervantes had a fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. Don Quixote, as a great book, appeals to the views of cynics just as much as anyone else.
"We're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are / Horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire / The fields are just fields, and there ain't no Lord"
and later
"Oh, oh, oh, well, this world is plain to see / It don't mean we can't believe in something, and anyway / My baby's coming back now on the next train / I can hear the whistle blowing, I can hear the mighty roar / I can hear the horses prancing in the pastures of the Lord"
p.s. I don't think Don Quixote is a great example of optimism...
For the Cynics, the purpose of life is to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people can gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which is natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame, and even flouting conventions openly and derisively in public. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(philosophy)
So many times things in life do not live up to expectations. Often you think you’re interacting with someone but really you’re just interacting with their ego, there is no genuine connection. They build up a rapport with you so they could later cash in on their influence and make you hand over what they really want.
The general incompetence of society, the proud ignorance of people who have dug themselves into holes, it makes you look like an asshole for not fitting in, just for minding your own business and doing what’s best for you. How can one not be a cynic in this kind of world? Everything new you come across is likely to disappoint.
I think this might be the key.
Have you heard this expression before:
Disappointment = expectations - reality
Unfortunately I'm not sure offhand where that saying originated, but I think it is true, at least for me.
I'll spare you a lecture on it because, believe me, I'm no expert. But it is an expression I try to remind myself of from time to time to cope with people and things that might anger me.
Obviously reality falls short of expectations no matter what we do. Enough disappointment will demoralize anyone. It will shatter their understanding of the world, their sense of right and wrong, of cause and effect. Cynicism is born when the disturbing realities become the new expectations. Cynicists expect the world to keep disappointing them.
I should have elaborated I guess, but tried to keep it short.
I have high expectations for people and things that are important and close to me, and low expectations for things not as important to me or out of my control.
It doesn't mean I don't care about some of those other things at all. It's just that I only have a limited amount of mental and emotional energy to spend, and I try to spend it wisely.
Edit: hmm, maybe I'm sort of a cynic if I have low expectations. But I don't really think of myself that way. I try to be optimistic and focus on things I can do and not dwell on what I can't.
But on the other hand, I would feel pretty sad if it is the case that you (or anyone) are so consumed by this that you cannot find joy or purpose in your own life.
Sometimes it is the more profitable strategy to realise and accept that it is very difficult or impossible for one person to fix the major and obvious failings with reality. But it is actually quite achievable, through introspection and rational thinking, to identify and modify our own reactions to those things when our reactions are negatively impacting our ability to experience a quota of joy and happiness that is sufficient to keep negative ruminations about the world to a manageable level.
At the end of the day, we are just animals. And for whatever reason, nature has seen to it that we are quite capable of experiencing a reasonable amount of joy and happiness just by going through the activities required of us to sustain our lives. Breathing, drinking, eating, moving around, fighting, cooperating, resting, attempting to reproduce, and so on.
If it were not so, then what would be the likelihood of our continuing to be here? Given that we must go through many years of this stuff, without giving up, in order to pass on our genetic material before we either kill ourselves or die.
Have a nice day, friend.
People are usually resistant to change, because 95% of ideas to change something are laughably bad, or not well thought out.
If you find yourself talking to too many "cynics", then the problem is you! Propose better ideas, that don't sound ridiculous or too far-fetched. Present them with a detailed plan to achieve win-win goals.
What is wrong with that. I would rather be a cynic and have the correct framing of the world than be too optimistic and deluded. Success at investing for example requires looking at things objectively.
If you're creating, executing, advising, or actually investing, anchoring on what "is" risks losing to competition that suffers no such limitations.
If you believe you have no power to change things, then it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can change things, you might be wrong. Which game you prefer to play is up to you.
During the Enlightenment, all this science stuff looked extremely stupid. If people didn't persevere through the cynicism, we wouldn't have advanced the way we did.
Lol. Where did you read your history of science? Totally bizarre.
I'm not super confident in my speculation, it just seems the most likely to me. What makes you so confident?
I studied history of science and philosophy of science seriously. Like reading books and papers across several classes. Old school.
I don't believe so. However I do believe that projecting a deluded self-assuring aura helps convince people to follow you, but that doesn't mean that your internals acts that way. It is really hard to know what people really think underneath that facade, I am pretty sure much more is going on that people want to show.
There are people that have remarkably positive outlooks on life and that allows them to do the daily grind that's necessary to achieve any semblance of change. A lot of people, seeing that you can actually progress in life, are moved by such personalities and find them inspiring.
That doesn't mean a person isn't sad, or can't get depressed, or not get seriously set back in life. It just means that pushing on and hoping for change can actually get you somewhere.
cynic!
Thinking this makes me a cynic? I don't think so. This is a fact that gets proven right every day on the internet. If anything I'm a hopelessly deluded optimist who thinks the web can actually go back to its pure beginnings when people said what they wanted without worrying that some advertiser will pull their funding.
What about passionate creators who use advertising as a means to finance their vocation? What about the wide informational and educational value of media?
They need to find new business models.
> What about the wide informational and educational value of media?
It's great but also a relatively tiny minority of all content. A niche really. And even those tend have ads.
Not if it works for both sides.
> It's great but also a relatively tiny minority of all content. A niche really. And even those tend have ads.
I disagree.
And even if it was true, why do you care? I mean, I watch almost only this kind of videos on YouTube - documentaries, education (learning German ATM), infotainment and there's a huge amount of it. Niche or not, there is still more than enough quality content to watch 24h/day.
The problems start when people start trying to sell my attention to the highest bidder. That's unacceptable. My attention is not theirs to sell. Not once did I consent to having information forcibly injected into my mind. I will resist it to the bitter end no matter the consequences.
That was the model for traditional media, as well.
Newspaper prices only covered a fraction of their costs, their most valuable products were the pages. Each page would have a different cost for ads (first page - super high price, second page - quite high, last page - also high, etc.).
Also, it's wrong to assume that cynicism leads to negative and passive attitudes. Cynics often bring bigger improvements faster than what people with positive attitude ever can, because, guess what, things suck. Being a cynic only means the one is negative about the current state and direction, and one can still be positive about the ideal state that the one believes in. Once that ideal is set, cynics can be the most fierce fighter for their own ideals.
Yet, for cynics to make progresses, it's important to get out of their own sweet spot and start moving. Ones who only love talking deserves all the criticism.
There are people who want to completely reject the fundamentals of how the world works. These are the people who create disasters.
Yes, optimism has its benefits but beware of those weaponizing it.
Best to participate in the theatre. Once you play a role long enough but also seem "pragmatic" in action, others of the same ilk will find you and invite you behind the curtain.
"according to cynics, the world operates in a certain way, the elites are always the same, and will always be the same. The cynics think we are always playing the same game that has always been played. For example, a cynic may think that media’s only purpose is to sells your attention to advertisers - like I did here. And often they might be right."
but I too be honest don't really see the problem with that kind of worldview. I'm not chronically depressed or antagonistic because of it, but I think I'd rather have what I'd consider a realistic and true view of the world as it is rather than anything else.
"One of the strongest medicines against cynical mindset which I’ve tried is to do a “no-complain challenge”. I find its effects to be enormous and durable for years. In this challenge, you move a bracelet from one wrist to the other when you catch yourself complaining. The goal is to make it 21 days without having move the wrist. "
Before you start prescribing medicine we need to agree that cynicism is an illness first, which is not so easily done. I think the author conflates people who are sort of angry or pessimistic because of their lot in life with his definition of a cynic. I take the cynical view because of what I perceive are fundamental aspects of human nature collectively, not my mood personally. I can beat that challenge without a problem because I rarely complain, or win the lottery tomorrow and it wouldn't really have an impact of my views on the way the world operates overall.
I see cynicism as coming from alienation, lack of alignment, "alone in a crowd" type of thing. I start thinking cynically when I have a problem that I don't trust other people with, and feel like I can't solve on my own.
It’s when the group has a lot of cynics is when we have a problem. Have you ever had to work with a group of “low energy” people? They’re not only just low energy — they’re energy vampires.
For instance if you had to direct an “employees right” course in a strongly anti-union company, you’d have “low energy” people looking at you with dead eyes, and you’d be complaining they suck your energy too. But is it really a problem outside of the scope of your course ?
[1] that I've met and interacted with, of course there's a sampling bias.
Pointing out every problem, all the time, isn't.
It's a very fine line and not everyone manages to stay on the right side.
There's a sort of false trichotomy at play in this post, and on Twitter I've noticed a dichotomous version: "Should we be happy that we're improving, or sad that there's so far to go?" (That's my summary of it, anyway)
Why not both? We should appreciate how far things have come (it is truely astounding), but of course that doesn't imply that we should be content with where we are. We should be deeply discontent - at least to the extent that it motivates us to fight towards a better future. A magnitude or type of discontent that leads to depression/apathy is obviously not helpful.
It seems like a significant portion of tribal "controversy" on social media is stoked by mouthpieces on either side that are almost purposefully playing into the dichotomy perspective, because adding subtlety into the discussion would throw water on the flames, and that's just ending the "fun".
I think this comment is a good example of a type of cynicism that we're discussing, probably the type that most instinctively jumps out as "cynical."
Like pessimism and optimism, cynicism often boils down to a bias.
The key word is "just" (virtue signalling). Blogging, commenting, and communicating generally are various things as once. We're pursuing intellectual curiosity, showing off, participating in a culture, signalling virtue, signalling other things... to ourselves and to others.
Our bias and/or perspective lens dictates our focus. A lot of cynicism, certainly within my generational cohort, is also about signalling. Signaling that we're not naive, that we're cool, grunge, etc. If you hate grunge, hippies, Diogenes or whatnot, you're more likely to adopt a perspective whereby they're "just" bunch of virtue signaling posers.
You can always plausibly adopt this perspective. Grunge, hippies, Diogenes & whatnot are attention seekers. They are cultural figures, which is kind of virtue signalling by definition. They're also other things though. Reducing these to "just" virtue signalling is cynicism regarding these things.
You can also have a general cynical viewpoint, but it's pretty hard to do without also adopting arseholery. As a general cynic, you pretty much assume that base motivation for everything. OP is just virtue-signalling optimism. Drewcoo is just edgelord cool-signalling. Netcan is just cool-signaling.
I think what is true from reading reddit, HN & the internet broadly is that cynicism is very "in" right now, to the point where it's annoying. Hence, I suppose, why such posts do well.
It's cargo-culting for non-(non-?)academia. HN, the world's #1 source of smartitude, may just be its purest crystallization.
A hardcore cynic might say, there is no improvement, only change. We might have come so far with some things, but lost or destroyed so many others in exchange.
You say that but a realistic and true view of the world will show that things have indeed changed for the better for a lot of marginalized people -- and within our lifetimes, too. It's definitely not "always the same", to paraphrase the author. If you think it is, you may be the kind of person the author is referring to.
I knew some cynical folks and you do not seem to be one of them. The criteria is not how objectively you view the world, but how you act on it. E.g. someone “redirects” the train of medicine for troops in a conflict, because anybody would do that if it wasn’t them (and spent this money on things much worse than they planned). Someone figuratively spits onto a guy operating a gate, because he didn’t choose to have a good time in his life anyway.
And they are right – that train would never make it to its destination, and a gate operator made a mistake in their career. But once you accept that as how the world works naturally, it’s easy to just go and take it, cause you’re not that bad, bad is the world. That is cynical. Simply seeing things as they are is not.
One of the strongest medicines against cynical mindset which I’ve tried is to do a “no-complain challenge” (from tfa)
I don’t know, maybe it works for them, but if I would no-complain everyday, I believe I’d become cynical AF. Our local prisoners have the rule: do not seek the truth, i.e. do not complain about anything, it is what it is. Everyone experiences it and your problem is irrelevant. This teaches them to live on their own, ignore any unfairness, and get whatever they can whenever they can. Long-term convicts basically live by these rules.
Of course there are levels of cynicism, and maybe it’s all about moderate levels of it, not extreme ones.
To take the prison example. I guess a cynical person would say, yes, complaining makes no sense because if you loudly complain the guards just beat you up. Staging a prison revolt is just going to give you more years and the justice system is screwed as well. The prison is a zero sum environment and you're likely only going to get ahead by screwing over someone else, and being deceptive and clever.
And honestly to me that's a fairly accurate description of actual prisons in most places. Cynics tend to be people who are acutely aware of power and how people leverage it for their own interests, but I don't think it implies that one has to resign from life.
Human personalities are extremely complicated, and the best you can do is correlate traits given a huge amount of data which he probably does not have. So we have him boasting a theory, that is likely based on the fundamental attribution errors in his experiences, and people, who vote his post up, who happen to have a similar sentiment with a few anecdata (who would also probably disregard any anti-anecdata in this thread).
So is the nature of most Internet posts about psychology.
Cynicism and nihilism are emotionally easy excuses not to try that lead to a variety of impoverishments. [Edit: they are conveniently self reinforcing too.]
An apparently popular and easy way not to complain about problems is to simply stop yourself from perceiving them. The bigger the problems get, and the more you are confronted with them, while you forbid yourself from recognising that any conflict exists, the more it begins to look like the problem is your own lack of faith or "positivity". So the worse things get, the more you double down on your faith by putting increasing amounts of energy in to maintaining a delusional belief system designed to deal with problems or conflicts by explaining them away as an internal problem with yourself or your own emotional tate.
Does this sound like a recipe for improving your situation? Or anyone's situation?
To me, it sounds much more like a reliable method for the cultivation of increasingly bizarre thoughts and erratic behaviour.
What if you, instead, did the bracelet trick for every time you avoided a confrontation with the world that you know is necessary? What if you just console yourself with the fact the the world has problems and the vast majority of them cannot be solved by you (since you are not the omnipotent force)? You do realise that you don't have to stop caring about the problems, right? You know that it's just not worth investing energy in to worrying about things that are completely out of your control, right? That isn't cynicism, it's the picture postcard of mental health.
The reason is, you have pre-decided an emotional polarity and you're consciously expending effort to compulsively fit the reality to the emotional polarity that you desire. That is the opposite way round to what you need if you desire both accurate perception AND healthy emotional regulation.
Anyway, good luck with it.